February 2011

- I wanted to learn how to swim, so Google showed me how to turn on the water at the sink and let me splash it around a bit. They then dragged me into a helicopter, flew way out into the ocean and dumped me out.

- I had an interesting request this week. A Unix system with three printers (p1, p2,p3) and two locations (North and South). The requirement is simple enough: jobs to p1 always go to p1, but jobs to p2 go either to p2 or p3, dependent upon the location (North or South). The p3 jobs have the same duality, but in reverse.

- I happened to read an article about revenue sharing sites that mentioned Question and Answer sites. These are sites where people post questions and others post answwers. The resulting pages carry Adsense advertising and there is some method of sharing revenue with either those who provide the questions, the answers, or both.

- Generally it is thought that programming languages can do anything that is thrown at it. This is not true. Programming languages have their strengths and weaknesses. Scripting languages are called as high level languages. You can't use them inside the OS kernel.

- Low quality results tick people off and might send them to use some other search engine. Google desperately needs to know what low quality is and that's very, very hard to do with an algorithm. But if a few million people block a site, that site probably should be dropped down for other searchers

- UNIX Is known for its tool chest which is ever expanding. There is no abating to the repertoire of tools that are at the disposal of UNIX programmer and sys admins. Without the clean design and power of UNIX OS, there could not have been the ecosystem and the atmosphere for programs that do great things.

- Given that Google proved that Microsoft DOES copy Google results and that that blog actually admits it while still trying to deny it, it's amazing that they haven't just taken that nonsense down, but it is still there for you to read if you haven't yet.

- Back in the 1980's, I could count on earning a few hundred dollars every month from hard disk failures and other problems (slow performance, lost files and so on). That may be a slight exaggeration, but crashing disk drives and performance complaints were much more common then than now.